Sabai Sayane Ek Mat #7

In the language of man there is no word greater than love. Whoever has known that one word has known all. Whoever is deprived of this one word—even if he has come to know everything else—there is no value in that knowing.
By its very nature, there is no way to know love except through love itself. To know the word will not be to know. Love is the deepest experience. And the experience is so deep that if even the lover remains, the experience will not happen. Only when the lover, too, dissolves in love, can the experience be complete.
So love cannot be known as a seer knows; you cannot stand at a distance and know it as a spectator. Only by disappearing can you know.
Just as a river, losing itself in the ocean, comes to know what it is to be the ocean; so too, only when some stream of life loses itself in the ocean of love, does it know what love is.
Kabir has said:
The two-and-a-half letters of love—whoever reads them becomes a pandit.
Reading and reading the scriptures, the world has died; no one became a pandit.
However many shastras one may read, all such reading is from the outside, outside. Knowing must be from within. However many circumambulations you may do around the temple from outside, the touch of the deity enthroned within will not be, nor will there be darshan. You may come to know many things about the temple, yet there will be no glimpse, no intimation of the One enthroned there. You will gain information about the temple’s walls, but the prana of the temple will remain unfamiliar. One must go within.
And going within does not mean that if you circumambulate the temple’s pratima you will reach the within; even then you will be moving around the outside of the pratima. Even then what you will know will be the outline of the pratima. To go within the temple means this: when you enter into the pratima itself. When there remains no one who is giving the circumambulation. When you do not remain at all. When only the pratima remains. When you disappear as a river disappears in the ocean; only then will you be able to know.
Love is knowledge. The only knowledge is love. All other knowing is merely superficial. For there is no other knowing in which the knower has to be effaced. This is the first condition of love: to be effaced, to be lost.
Birth happens, death happens. Everyone is born, everyone dies. Between birth and death, the one who becomes acquainted with love attains amrit. Then there is no more birth for him, no more death. Between birth and death—between these two banks—the flow that is, is love. All are born, all die; very few come to know love. The opportunity to know is given to all; very few are able to use that opportunity.
Those who do are blessed. Those who do—then they need not enter again between birth and death. Whoever has known love has gone beyond. There is only one boat that will carry you across: the boat of love.
Someone asked Jesus, “What is the manner, what is the form of your God?” Jesus said, “God is love.”
If only Jesus had known Dadu’s words—Dadu said it even more sweetly:
Love is Allah’s caste; love is Allah’s limb.
Love is Allah’s very being; love is Allah’s hue.
God’s nature is love; God’s body is love; God’s soul, God’s very existence is love; God’s manner, mode, outline—love.

Jesus’ saying that God is love is worth probing very deeply. It does not mean God is a lover. It does not mean God is compassionate. It does not mean God is merciful, as many Christians have understood. Had Jesus meant that, he would have said: God is loving, supremely compassionate, merciful. He did not. He said: God is love—not a lover, not compassionate, not merciful, but love itself. God is not a personality; God is energy. Love is energy—pure power, the purest power, the supreme, the ultimate.

As with a seed you sow—that’s the first stage. It becomes a tree—that’s the second. Flowers bloom—that’s the third. Then fragrance takes wing into the sky—that’s the fourth. Love is that fragrance. Lust is the seed. Love is the final event; beyond it, nothing more. The seed has a form; does fragrance have a form? The seed has an address; does scent have an address? You can grab the seed, the tree, even hold the flower in your fist—but what of the fragrance? Close your fist and the fragrance won’t remain inside.

No one can bind love. Whoever tries will be left holding trash. This is not how you hold fragrance. With fragrance, you yourself must take flight with it, merge into it, attune yourself to its endless, formless being—fall like a drop into the ocean. Only the one who becomes fragrance will know.

Naturally there must be a deep obstacle, for so many are born and so few taste love; multitudes die without ever knowing it. The obstacle is there. If we understand it rightly, the sutra becomes clear.

Lust is love’s lowest form. It belongs to love, but is bound in great limitation, encircled by the petty. Lust means: the body’s attraction to the body. Naturally lust is of the earth—very gross; it smells of soil. Born of dust, to dust it will return; above the mud it has no existence.

What we ordinarily call “love” is of a higher order. Dadu wouldn’t call it love; we do. It is the attraction of two minds. It is above the body; a few steps up the ladder. Whoever attains even this much is blessed, for most end at the body. They never sense there were heights beyond the body, deeper depths. They never realize the body was but a rung—a step to be used to rise.

Those in whom a glimpse of love dawns that rises a little beyond the body, that touches the other’s personhood, a breath beyond body into feeling—even they come to understand: there must be more to know. A door opens—no longer a wall. Those who end at the body are walled in.

There is a third love the devotees call prayer. When attraction is between two bodies, it is lust; between two minds, what we call love; between two souls, prayer. And when the two are utterly lost, no longer two, that is ishq—the term Dadu uses; the term Jesus truly meant by love. That is the final height.

These steps are within you. If you stand on the first, no one else is to blame. The second is close at hand. But the hindrance is deep: fear of dying. The higher you go, the more your ego thins and melts. The higher the height, the less you are. That is the fear. The lower you stay, the more you are. Lying flat on the ground you are like a rock. Rocks don’t rise; fragrance rises, a flame’s tongue rises, steam rises. You must become rarefied. You must lose yourself.

In lust you do not lose yourself. You remain you; you use the other. You don’t dissolve; in fact, you try to dissolve the other. Hence the endless quarrel between husbands and wives throughout human history. A thousand ways have been tried to end it—none succeed. It seems quarrel cannot end until human beings learn to rise. The quarrel is the effort of each to erase the other: the wife trying to erase the husband, the husband the wife. Each ego struggles to survive: “Before the other erases me, I must erase them.” It feels like the only safety.

So lust is far from love; it is closer to violence. The sages asked us to rise above lust for this reason. Mahavira said clearly: lust is violence. The Jain scholars have failed to explain this, and pundits invented foolishness: that in intercourse, microbes are killed by friction; hence lust is violence. Blind men making up meanings! Mahavira called lust violence because wherever lust is, there is the urge to annihilate the other. That is violence. Until lust becomes love, violence continues—and until lust becomes love, brahmacharya does not appear.

Brahmacharya is not the renunciation of lust; it is the release of the love hidden within lust. Don’t murder lust; that’s like crushing the seed—then sit and wait: no fragrance will come. The seed too would not have yielded fragrance while it remained intact. It must break—in the soil—so that the seed perishes but the fragrance concealed within is set free. Then a long journey: seed to tree, tree to flower, flower to fragrance.

But if you take a stone and smash the seed, as many so-called sadhus and renunciates do—killing lust out of fear of violence—you’ll wait forever for the scent of brahmacharya. You will find their lives hanging in mid-air, like Trishanku—neither of this world nor the other.

The plight of such ascetics is worse than yours. At least you have the seed; you may be stuck at the seed, but the possibility remains to sow it. It is never too late. But the ascetic, fearing lust, smashes the seed; with it dies the possibility of fragrance.

Brahmacharya is not the opposite of lust; it is lust’s purest expression. Fragrance is not the opposite of the seed; it is the seed’s highest flowering. What’s the difference? Whatever was of the earth in the seed sinks into the earth; whatever was of the sky is released as fragrance. So too within you: the earthy will slowly drop back to earth, and your sky—call it soul, call it God—will be freed, rootless, taking flight. That is moksha, nirvana.

Understand me rightly: I am for brahmacharya and not against lust. If you are against lust, you destroy the very means to brahmacharya—the first rung of the ladder. Burn the ladder and you don’t rise; you fall below even the ladder.

Whoever does not understand lust rightly will not attain brahmacharya; they will attain only impotence. If impotence led to God, all eunuchs would be enlightened. Have you ever heard of one? It is impossible—for they have no seed to sow, no harvest to reap, no fragrance to release.

There is nothing wrong with lust; the wrong is in stopping there. You must go beyond. Then you will even be grateful to lust: “Without you I could not have risen.” Then even toward desire your heart will be gracious, not angry and condemning.

Between two bodies, attraction will always carry violence. Bodies are solid; they cannot truly merge. Even when they “meet” in lust, where do they meet? It is an illusion. Try to collide two clay lamps—there will be noise, clash, breakage; they can break each other, not merge. But bring their flames near: two flames become one—no obstruction, no struggle, not a whisper. The subtle unites with the subtle; soul meets soul. The gross cannot unite.

Thus, the subtler you become, the deeper the union. And there comes the final moment of which Dadu says: Love is Allah’s very being—where two so utterly merge you cannot separate them again; their forms dissolve; there is no way to pull them apart. That happens at the heights.

Transform lust into love. Two minds can meet—more so than bodies, because mind is subtler. Sometimes it happens. I speak; I use mind. You listen; you use mind. Sometimes it happens that for a moment you are not there, nor I; the listener and the speaker become one for a split second—that very moment you taste meditation, suddenly, without effort.

But mind is a flow, not eternal. Two streams can run side by side a while, then diverge. Thus mind-union is momentary.

Higher still is the meeting of souls—the devotees call it prayer. It happens between guru and disciple when the disciple surrenders utterly, with no flicker of doubt, not saving anything. “Shishya” means one who has given himself and said, “As you will.”

I heard of a Sufi master. A young man came and said, “Make me your disciple.” The master said, “Do you know what it means? A hard discipline—training, duties, refinement. The rains are near; cut wood for the ashram, fix the roof, tend the garden, cook in the kitchen—such work will be yours.” The youth said, “And the guru’s duties?” The master said, “The guru has no duties. He sits and instructs.” The youth fell at his feet and said, “Then teach me to be a guru!” Many call themselves disciples, but secretly they crave to be gurus—then they miss. They become disciples only in the hope of becoming gurus tomorrow. The ego refuses to surrender; it even plays at surrender—but play deceives only yourself.

Thus you will miss the prayer that can flower at a guru’s feet. You will not learn prayer before stone idols either. Your ego finds no obstacle in bowing to a stone; there is no living other before whom your pride trembles. In truth, when you bow before a stone idol, you bow before your own idea. The Muslim bows in a mosque, the Hindu in a temple—each bows to his own conception. Ask a Hindu to bow in a mosque or a Jain to bow in a temple—his spine stiffens. We bow to our notions; we bend at our own feet. That is the ego’s play.

A living master cannot fit your notions. Only the dead can. A living one is a flood; he will break your channels. Before him the only way to bow is to die. If even a trace of your notion remains, you will stumble: “Is this man a true knower? Does he behave by my scriptures? Does he fit my standards?” If he fits your notions and you bow, know that you still bow to your notion.

Seeking a master means seeking someone who shatters your notions; not one who agrees with them. Someone who uproots your thoughts, breaks your sleep. Ego is a stupor; until you wake, nothing happens.

A story: A man planted a beautiful garden, but every morning it was half-ruined—plants torn, saplings uprooted. He suspected neighbors, set guards—no one came. He suspected spirits, wore amulets—no change. A fakir told him: “Set an alarm for midnight; wake for five minutes for seven nights and look around.” For two nights—nothing. The third night, when the alarm rang, he found himself asleep in the garden, uprooting his own plants. He ran to the fakir: “Had you not woken me, I’d have kept trying every other remedy, but the destroyer was me, in my sleep.” So it is: no one else ruins your garden; you do, in the sleep of ego. Wake up.

Ego is intoxication. When you leave yourself at someone’s feet… Note the subtlety: if you surrender to someone simply because his ideas match yours, it is mind-to-mind—second-grade. Surrender to one whose ideas may differ—even oppose yours—but in whom you glimpse a level of being higher than yours. Don’t fuss over ideas; in the end, ideas don’t matter. Only the ladder of consciousness matters. If before someone you must lift your head to see him, leave yourself at his feet—then the third event happens: prayer.

Only after this third does the fourth become possible—what Dadu calls ishq, what Jesus called love. In the fourth there is no particular person whose feet you touch. The third happens at the guru’s feet: he has form, color, shape. The fourth is at the feet of the formless, the unshaped: you simply let go into the Whole; you flow with the All.

“Until the head is given, love does not happen.
The lover does not fear dying; only he drinks the beloved’s cup.”

Until you are ready to give your head, love will not be. “Head” means two things: your thinking and your ego. Your stiffness and your thought are in the head; your “I” as well.

Until you set down this head—there will be no ishq. Only when you die does love happen—like the seed that must die for the tree to be born. You are the seed; only by dying can something vast be born within. That is the obstacle: your fear of death. In trying to save yourself, you breed violence and set about destroying the other.

There are two kinds of people. One, those busy saving themselves—naturally, in saving themselves they set about destroying others. The other, those who see that dying is inevitable—why worry?—and set about dissolving themselves. Whoever erases himself entirely gives birth to the fragrance of love.

“The lover does not fear dying;
only he is worthy of the beloved’s cup.”

Have you noticed—even ordinary lovers do not fear death? Leave aside the great love; look at a Majnun or a Farhad—their love dissolves fear. Love is greater than death. Any love that fears death is not love.

If even for a moment love has ever descended upon you, you will be ready to die wholly for it. You will say, “This one moment is enough; knowing this one, I have known all. This one moment is eternity. If I die now, I die fulfilled.”

If that can happen in ordinary love, what to say of the love between disciple and master, or between person and the Divine? In that love, the sense “I can die” does not even arise; love is immortality. Whoever knows love drops the fear of death that very moment.

Look into life and you’ll find those who fear death most are those who never loved or gave love. They cling to wealth, for wealth promises some defense against death. Misers cannot love, for love is giving. A miser only takes; he cannot give. Not knowing how to give, how will he know love? Love is pure giving—wanting to give oneself entirely, to lavish everything upon the beloved. In that total giving, the first glimpse of the immortal appears.

“Dadu says: the letter of love—rarely does anyone read it.
Read Vedas and Puranas as much as you will—without love, what becomes of it?”

No one reads the letter of love; it is a costly bargain—the price is your head. Only a courageous few who stake themselves read love’s letter, love’s Gita. Vedas and Puranas you can buy for a song; love is not for sale in any market; no coin can buy it. It asks only you—nothing less. Give all your possessions, keep yourself back—love will say, “This won’t do. I ask only you.”

“Dadu says: the letter of love—rarely does anyone read it.
Read Vedas and Puranas—without love, what becomes of it?”

“When the love of my Beloved
entered this frame of bones,
from every pore rose only ‘Beloved! Beloved!’—
Dadu is no other.”

This is a very sweet saying. This is the fourth love—beyond prayer, for in prayer a bit of duality remains: worshiper, worship, and the Worshiped. In the fourth:

“When the love of my Beloved
entered this frame of bones,
from every pore rose ‘Beloved! Beloved!’—
Dadu is no other.”

Now I don’t have to take His Name—it resounds of itself. My pores cry “Beloved! Beloved!” I look for “Dadu” and find him nowhere—only that “Beloved! Beloved!” Dadu is no other; he has become prayer. Not “Dadu prays”—Dadu is prayer.

Try a small experiment with mantra and you’ll understand. At first you pronounce the word—say, Om; it takes effort; you sound it. Then your lips fall silent; you aren’t telling anyone—let it resound within; the throat still moves. After some time, one day, without warning, you are busy with something and suddenly you become aware—what is this? You didn’t intone Om, but inside it is humming. This startles the devotee who had to force it earlier and would often forget; now, if the current keeps on, it seeps into every fiber. One day, it happens that you are neither doing nor hearing—the chanting alone remains:

“Dadu is no other.”

Suddenly you see, “Where have I gone? Only Om resounds—neither am I chanting nor hearing; I am not.”

“The lover has become the beloved—that alone is called ishq.”

This needs to be understood, for in the devotee’s life it marks a great revolution. The lover is masculine; the masculine is aggressive; even prayer can become a claim. The feminine is not aggressive. Hence a woman never initiates love; she waits—because even saying “I love you” would violate her feminine nature; it would be a crossing of the other’s boundary. She invites, but subtly—her every breath calls; still, she does not attack. The initiative is the man’s.

“Dadu says: We started as lovers—chasing You, screaming Your Name across mountains, caves, Himalayas; at Kashi, at Kaaba we sought You. It was an attack; we would unmask Your secret, conquer You.” In its depths, the urge was to conquer.

“Then a moment came when love deepened and aggression vanished. Now we do not seek; we wait. We saw that ‘seeking’ itself was ego. How can we find You? Only by Your grace do You reveal Yourself. We knocked at every door; the houses seemed empty. Now we see: they were not empty—our aggression made You withdraw.”

Can anyone attack God? Rationalists don’t find God because reason is violence; it wants to prove, to pin down. Scientists can’t find God; science is violence. Marx said, “I’ll accept God the day the scientist traps Him in a test-tube.” But if God were trapped in a tube, would He be God? He’d be an insect; who would worship Him? Even Marx later added: if God could be caught in a test-tube, He would no longer be God. Science cannot discover God; whatever it discovers cannot be God. Reason and science are masculine: impatient, hurried, restless to get, but without the heart’s understanding that some things come only by waiting. You can invite some guests; you cannot abduct them.

God is your Guest. Keep the door open; keep the bed ready; keep the house clean for the Guest. That is your work.

“Now the lover has become the beloved”—you wait, watch the road. A leaf stirs—you jump: “He’s come?” A breeze touches the door—“Did He knock?” You are alert, waiting, but not aggressive. You have seen: if He chooses to hide, where will you find Him? To force revelation is a kind of rape. You can violate a body, but not the soul; the soul appears only to the lover.

Thus I call science rape, reason rape; poetry and prayer are love. Only the heart can approach the heart.

Jesus said: until you become like women, you will not attain. Nietzsche, opposing Buddha and Jesus, said they were more feminine than masculine. He meant it as criticism, but it is true. Look at Buddha’s form—there is feminine grace, no masculine harshness. His face is soft, waiting; his silence and samadhi are pure waiting. There is nothing to do—only to wait so totally that your whole being becomes a path, your eyes a road.

At the last moment, all who attained became like women—tender, waiting, non-aggressive: only open doors.

“Now the lover is the beloved—only that is ishq.
And when the lover has become the beloved,
Allah Himself becomes the lover of that beloved.”

When you are feminine, God rushes in. Those who know say: you cannot seek God; prepare yourself and He comes. Call Him—but not with your lips; let the call rise in the void. Write Him letters—but in invisible script; send them through the empty sky. Be ready—and He becomes your lover.

This is revolutionary. As long as you remain a lover, you seek God as beloved. That is the mistake—your aggression makes the beloved hide behind a thousand veils. Drop your chase; become the beloved, and there is no reason for Him to hide—He comes.

Then comes the supreme utterance:
Love is Allah’s caste; love is Allah’s limb.
Love is Allah’s very being; love is Allah’s hue.

Dadu’s definition of God is unmatched.

“Love is Allah’s caste.” It is paradoxical—caste is of hatred; love has no caste. You are a Hindu because you hate the Muslim; a Jain because you hate the Hindu. If hatred falls truly, on what basis do you remain a Hindu or Jain? All boundaries are born of enmity. If there is no enemy, boundaries vanish. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: to make nations strong, keep their enmities alive; otherwise they weaken. Your strength is of hatred. Imagine having no enemies—what caste, what country, what society would you have then? All would be yours.

Love has no boundary; all boundaries belong to hate. So Dadu says, sweetly and paradoxically: if you insist on asking God’s caste—Hindus, Muslims, Christians could claim Him, Brahmin or Shudra could claim Him—but no, His “caste” is love. All those are castes of hatred, born of man’s madness. When you are sane, you find yourself simply human—vast, without adjectives. Yet from your heart rises a single ceaseless feeling—love.

So Dadu says: Love is Allah’s caste. If you insist on a label, take this one. And for those going toward God, your own “caste” must become love: drop Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh—these have divided man. Until you are so full of love that you see no enemy, no stranger, your ego has not died; you have not given your head. The day you set your head down, what Hindu or Muslim remains? None—love becomes your caste.

“Love is Allah’s limb.” You ask: what is His form? Four-armed? Three heads? Trinity? How are His eyes, His face? Each religion has drawn its own picture. If you must ask, Dadu says, love is His body—He lives encircled by love; around Him is only love. In that oil of love, His flame burns.

Make love your body; do not mistake the flesh for your body, nor the mind for your body. Let feeling, devotion, the heart be your body. If feeling becomes your body, God’s lamp will be seen—it burns already; you will recognize it. Recognition fails because you take clay and thought as your body; you rarely reach feeling. Hence Dadu: “Feeling, devotion, trust”—not thinking, not cogitation.

“Love is Allah’s very being.” A precious word: being/existence. This whole “moujood”—what is present—is ishq; existence’s way of being is love. This entire existence moves in and as love. The day you see we are born from love’s ocean and we dissolve back into love’s ocean, revolution happens; religion is born. To recognize love is religion.

Seek Him in love, not in statues. If you find Him in love, then you will see Him in statues too. Search only in images—you will not find Him.

“And love is His hue.” Scholars define God with three words: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. Lovers like Dadu say only one: love. “Omnipotent” is our ego’s projection; ego worships power and wants to know everything and be everywhere. Dadu says simply: love. And the wonder is: without proclaiming it, love is omnipotent. Have you tasted love’s power? Only the weak proclaim power. Love’s power is so natural, complete, it knows nothing of weakness. I remember Baal Shem Tov: “Contentment is perfect only when you don’t even know it.” So with love’s power.

Real life is not about knowing; it is about being. Love is being; knowing comes as its shadow. Love is everywhere because love knows no boundary—you needn’t say “omnipresent.”

Therefore:
Love is Allah’s caste; love is Allah’s limb.
Love is Allah’s very being; love is Allah’s hue.

Be dyed in love and you are dyed in Allah. When your way of being becomes love, prayer has happened. Then whether you affirm God or not makes no difference. Buddha never spoke of God—love sufficed. Mahavira denied God—why add another complication? Love suffices.

Thus I say: no word in human language is greater than love—not even “God.” You can live without “God”; you cannot live without love. Deny God and still live; deny love and you rot. Know love and you will know God; there is no other way. If humanity were to forget God—no harm; only remember love.

Let Dadu’s saying become your Upanishad. Engrave it upon your heart. Hum it so it seeps into bone and marrow. Sit quietly with it, reflect, meditate. Try it in small ways: when a Muslim comes, drop the veil of “Muslim” from your eyes and look at the human; you will find your own kind there—weak, suffering, seeking God—whether in a Muslim, Christian, or Hindu. All are searching for the One, even in their wandering. Try making love your “caste.” At once you will see how many boundaries evaporate, how many walls collapse.

Love is Allah’s caste; love is Allah’s limb.
Love is Allah’s very being; love is Allah’s hue.

Enough for today.